Filed under: Book Conservation, General Musings, Health, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech
As a book conservator, one of the things I deal with most frequently is problems caused by the embrittlement of paper and other cellulose materials. This embrittlement is, generally, caused by residual acid content from the manufacturing of those materials. For a period of about 130 – 140 years (basically from the start of the American Civil War until just before the turn of the 21st century), paper was most widely manufactured using an acid bath to wash away non-cellulose fibers, which left that residual acid content slowly weakening the paper. This is a process known among conservators and librarians as “slow fire“, since it is essentially an oxidation process akin to the combustion of fire, but on a longer time scale. Perhaps surprisingly, this mechanism wasn’t understood at all until about the time of my birth some fifty years ago, when research started to show what was actually happening to paper at this very basic level.
Now the majority of paper is made using an alternative process, primarily due to environmental needs (less pollution). It is a side benefit, but an important one, that this usually results in a much more stable and longer-lasting paper, one which doesn’t have that residual acid content causing problems. Because paper doesn’t have to become embrittled with age – I have lots of examples of paper made 500 years ago that looks as fresh and supple as paper made last week. The paper we’re most widely using now has a similar stability.
* * * * * * *
Now, it seems, scientists studying evolution and extinction may have stumbled upon a similar stability issue with regards to humans, and it could portend a medical breakthrough which would save countless lives and extend others.
Writing for Seed Magazine this week, Peter Ward notes that of the five major mass extinction events in Earth’s history, one of them was undoubtedly due to a single chemical:
But now, together with Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, I believe we have found a possible biochemical scar, present within living animals, that links Earth’s greatest mass extinction to a single substance: hydrogen sulfide (H2S). Hydrogen sulfide is a relatively simple molecule that gives rotten eggs their distinctive foul odor and is quite toxic–in high concentrations a single breath can kill. And it looks like that is what happened: Hundreds of millions of years ago, hydrogen sulfide probably saturated our oceans and atmosphere, poisoning nearly every creature on Earth.
Yet some creatures, like our very distant ancestors, must have somehow survived this toxic environment. What Roth has discovered is that H2S, incredibly, also has the ability to preserve and save lives. In small doses the chemical puts many animals into a state of “suspended animation,” a useful adaptation that would have allowed creatures to, in essence, hibernate through the catastrophe of mass extinction. If this idea is correct, our understanding of the deep past could lead to a dramatic medical revolution very soon.
What kind of dramatic medical revolution? The Science Fiction dream of suspended animation, allowing people with an illness or injury to be “set aside” for decades until medical science comes up with a cure, or a way of putting their brain in a newly cloned body?
Nope. Something a lot simpler, and probably a lot more useful. This:
When we humans are cut or injured, our bodies naturally produce small quantities of hydrogen sulfide. In essence, the body may be trying to put itself into suspended animation to survive the injury, an instinct held over millions of years in our genes. Yet whenever one of us is dying, say from a heart attack, our first instinct is to give that person oxygen. The problem with this “life-saving” first response may be that the oxygenated red blood cells rush to the damaged cells and act like gasoline on a fire. Oxygen is one of the most chemically active substances on Earth, and though we need it to survive, it can ravage our bodies. The oxygen increases the reactions causing the heart attack in the first place; it tears up more cells and overwhelms the virtual suspended animation that the body-produced hydrogen sulfide created. Then it kills you.
Oxygen. From whence we get the term Oxidation. As in “burning” or “fire”. So, what to do? Here’s the concluding bit from the article:
Perhaps our first instinct in instances of a heart attack should be to cool the body and let hydrogen sulfide do its natural work. To save life, in other words, you may first have to effectively suspend it with hydrogen sulfide. This tactic may just be what got us so far in the first place.
There is no clear understanding yet of why our injured bodies are able to produce hydrogen sulfide or why H2S puts some mammals into suspended animation. But I believe that Roth has found our body’s own memory of the ancient events that nearly killed our distant ancestors. Some proto-mammals may have been exposed to H2S, and instead of dying, they were placed into a state of suspended animation that allowed them to survive until the initial hydrogen sulfide levels subsided and they were reanimated. Some lucky evolutionary accident ensured the mammals’ safety through a deep sleep, and that accident may still be dormant within us. That which allowed our ancestors to survive millions of years ago might also be a means of our survival now.
* * * * * * *
Like paper made 50 years ago, I am not as supple or fresh as when I was born. I too have experienced my own version of embrittlement. There is only so much my body can do to keep up with the effects of oxidation. There are plenty of commercial products out there touting their antioxidant effect, just as there are products I use to neutralize acid in paper, but none of these will return me to my youth, just as I cannot reverse the effects of embrittlement in paper.
But it seems that perhaps we have a new insight into some of the mechanisms at work. I don’t expect to live forever, but I certainly wouldn’t mind having better and more effective medical treatment for what time I have. As a conservator, my best hope is to preserve what suppleness there is still left in paper. I’d be willing to settle for the same thing, myself.
Jim Downey
And, actually, sometimes even people who say so are selling something.
Eh?
A friend sent me a link to this blog post, in reaction to my recent funk. From the post:
I called up Rae and complained. She snorted and said, “Join the club”. She was not unsympathetic, but merely voicing the truth: to be an artist means you are going to suffer. Why? Because to create takes time, and we want it now. Pulling those ideas down out of the ether or out of the universe or wherever the hell they come from is so damn time-consuming. And we want– no we expect the idea now.
Amen. That may be part of my current funk – the expectation that now that my care-giving role is over, I should be able to recover and just start being the brilliant and creative person I know I really am.
Ah, well. Good insight.
Oh, and good art. Take it from someone who owned and operated an art gallery for 8 years: this is good art, and the prices are quite reasonable.
Jim Downey
(Hat tip to ML. And if you didn’t recognize the quote used in the title, shame on you. It’s from this.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Government, Guns, Health, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Press, Privacy, RKBA, Society, Survival, Terrorism, Violence
If you know me at all, from personal experience or just from my writings, you might be a bit surprised to know that when I was a kid I was considered bookish, uninterested in athletics, a bit nerdy. I distinctly remember being pushed to close whatever book I was quietly reading, and to go outside and play ‘like a real boy’.
Why do I mention this? Well, because I have been following with some interest the whole ‘controversy’ around Lenore Skenazy‘s recent column and subsequent news coverage/website devoted to the concept of “Free Range Kids“. In itself, it is fascinating that Skenazy’s ideas have generated this kind of reaction – challenging the prevailing cultural norms about child-rearing and parental control (under the guise of keeping kids safe). Lots of people are saying that it is about time for us to get away from “helicopter parents” who so over-protect their kids that the kids never get any real life experience. Just look at the comments at BoingBoing, on her website, or just about anywhere else – she gets some criticism, but for the most part people are saying either that “it’s about time” or “what’s the big deal – this is how most of the working class folks get along”.
But beyond that, there is something else that comes through: a basic desire for people to have some freedom back, that the whole “security” mindset may have gone too far, that we have gotten well away from our self-professed ideal of being the “Home of the Brave”. I don’t think that this is the least bit surprising, nor that it would show up in these kinds of discussions, because I think that the issues are very closely interrelated.
Let’s talk about Skenazy’s notions again for a moment. Her basic premise is that while we need as parents (and as a society) to take some reasonable precautions, it is also extremely important that kids be allowed to actually experience life outside the purview of parents and other authorities – to have a little room to learn about things like self reliance, independence, and problem solving. Her example is letting her 9 year old son ride the subway in NYC on his own. What happened? I’ll quote from her site:
When I wrote a column for The New York Sun on “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone,” I figured I’d get a few e-mails pro and con.
Two days later I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, FoxNews and all manner of talk radio with a new title under my smiling face: “America’s Worst Mom?”
Yes, that’s what it took for me to learn just what a hot-button this is — this issue of whether good parents ever let their kids out of their sight. But even as the anchors were having a field day with the story, many of the cameramen and make up people were pulling me aside to say that THEY had been allowed to get around by themselves as kids– and boy were they glad. They relished the memories!
And the next paragraph nicely summarizes what the real problem is, as I see it:
Had the world really become so much more dangerous in just one generation?Yes — in most people’s estimation. But no — not according to the evidence. Over at the think tank STATS.org, where they examine the way the media use statistics, researchers have found that the number of kids getting abducted by strangers actually holds very steady over the years. In 2006, that number was 115, and 40% of them were killed.
Now, why do people have the perception that the world is much more dangerous now, when the statistics don’t support that? Hmm. Think about it for half a moment and the answer is obvious: because that is what we are constantly told by the mainstream media, both in news and in fiction. And I’m not just talking about kids being kidnapped, assaulted, or murdered. If it isn’t the government trying to scare us senseless about some new terrorist threat, it is some TV show preying on your fears with murder or deadly ingredients in your food/water. Think of what sells papers and ad-time, and you’ll understand the motivation. It has always been so. But what has changed in the last generation is the absolute saturation that we get from these sources.
I am the first to acknowledge that the world is, indeed, a dangerous place. When I was barely starting adolescence my dad was murdered, and my mom was killed in a car accident, for crying out loud. Sure, neither of those is as bad as the loss of a child, but still. I do take reasonable precautions in going about my life, from trying to watch my diet to getting exercise to carrying a gun (and other safety tools). I use my seat belt and pay attention while driving. But I also live my life – because I know that no matter what, I’m going to die of something someday, and I would much rather enjoy the life I have than live in fear of losing it.
It is simply impossible to live a fully protected life. Just as it is simply impossible to fully protect kids from harm. Furthermore, it is completely counter-productive. In the case of kids, all you are doing is denying them the opportunity to really learn about themselves – the one and only person that they will have to rely on in the future. Kids have to learn to walk on their own. And they have to learn to get up when they fall. Sure, they’ll get hurt. They’ll scrape a knee, maybe get cut, maybe even break a bone. Know what? That’s life. They’ll heal, or learn to deal with it.
That’s harsh, but I am not advocating harshness. I am advocating bravery. Because that is what will come from learning that yes, you will get hurt – but you will recover from it. Yes, life will present problems, but you can learn to overcome them or cope with it. Learning that is liberating, and the sooner someone learns it, the more fully they will enjoy what life they have.
Likewise, in seeking to protect ourselves from threats, we have done nothing but lose our bravery as a nation. And lose our freedoms.
Let the kids range free. And let your own faith in yourself range a little freer, as well.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
It is enlightening, if sometimes dismaying, to discover what sorts of things motivate people. I have found that one of the most reliable ways of doing this is to see what sorts of motivations they perceive in others – what motives they attribute for a given behaviour.
Case in point: our caring for Martha Sr. I had mentioned previously that there was some discord in the family about the distribution of her estate. And what at the time seemed to be a misplaced guilt (that still may be the base motivation, actually) causing this has now manifested as a perception that we cared for her over the last five years out of some financial motivation. Yes, it seems that some thought that we did what we did in order to benefit from a more favorable disbursement of her estate.
*Sigh* This is so wrong that it took me a while to really wrap my head around it.
As I told a friend via email this morning:
Needless to say, this is not why we did what we did – honestly, no amount of money (well, no reasonable amount of money) would be sufficient inducement for me to have cared for someone like that for so long. It was done out of love – for her, and for my wife.
And I’ve been thinking more about it. Why? Because I like to understand my own motivations, and to keep them as honest and clean as possible. I’m an idealist, and try to approach the world that way, knowing full well that the world is not an ideal place and that reality will likely not be kind to my approach. When my motivations are questioned, either directly or by events, I like to step back and reconsider – and will make changes if necessary to insure that my motives are clear.
We were favored by Martha Sr. in her will. Not to a great degree – the value of it was less than I could have earned in the intervening years, had I been working rather than caring for her. And it was considerably less than would have been spent on either hiring full time care-givers, or moving her into a nursing home for that time. But because this additional benefit was there, some made the assumption that this was our motivation for caring for her. And this has caused the discord mentioned above.
So, after discussing the matter with my wife, we’re going to wipe out the benefit, just split up her estate equally and without consideration. It is not worth the grief. We didn’t do what we did for money or property – we did it because it was the right thing to do, and we could. Removing the benefit should resolve in anyone’s mind what our motivation was.
Everyone grieves in their own way. We may have wiped the slate clean, but that doesn’t mean that the grieving process is over. Not by a long shot. There are still sympathy cards on the mantelpiece. There is still a sudden slight panic over where the monitor is when I forget for a moment that Martha Sr is gone. There is guilt over the times we failed in some way, and joy over memories of happy moments Martha Sr had even in those final difficult days. And there is a profound gratitude I feel in having experienced this role of being a care provider.
I think that I am richer for this experience than others who have not been through it. I sometimes wonder whether the tendency to put people in nursing homes is partially done out of a fear of grieving – to create a distance from a loved one who is reaching the end of life, and so to mitigate the pain of loss. If so, those who take that path have indeed curtailed the amount of pain that they would feel, perhaps even cut short the time needed to completely grieve. But they have also cut themselves off from a remarkable human experience.
Jim Downey
Updated, April 13: I cross-posted this to dKos yesterday, where it generated some interest and discussion you wish to also see. You can find that here.
JD
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Daily Kos, Expert systems, General Musings, Government, Predictions, Privacy, Space, tech, Terrorism
Ah, great – the military has a new techno gizmo to use in the Global War on Terror: a hand-held lie detector! From the article:
FORT JACKSON, S.C. – The Pentagon will issue hand-held lie detectors this month to U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan, pushing to the battlefront a century-old debate over the accuracy of the polygraph.
The Defense Department says the portable device isn’t perfect, but is accurate enough to save American lives by screening local police officers, interpreters and allied forces for access to U.S. military bases, and by helping narrow the list of suspects after a roadside bombing. The device has already been tried in Iraq and is expected to be deployed there as well. “We’re not promising perfection — we’ve been very careful in that,” said Donald Krapohl, special assistant to the director at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment, the midwife for the new device. “What we are promising is that, if it’s properly used, it will improve over what they are currently doing.”
Of course, there are all kinds of problems here. let’s just start with the next paragraph in the story:
But the lead author of a national study of the polygraph says that American military men and women will be put at risk by an untested technology. “I don’t understand how anybody could think that this is ready for deployment,” said statistics professor Stephen E. Fienberg, who headed a 2003 study by the National Academy of Sciences that found insufficient scientific evidence to support using polygraphs for national security. “Sending these instruments into the field in Iraq and Afghanistan without serious scientific assessment, and for use by untrained personnel, is a mockery of what we advocated in our report.”
Furthermore, the only tests which have been conducted on the devices has been done by the company selling them to the military. And that only involved a small group of paid volunteers (226 people, from the same MSNBC story). American volunteers. Here at home. Meaning without taking into consideration either cultural differences or the stress factors of a war environment.
Now, think about that for just a moment. They sold the military a bunch (94) of these units, even though they haven’t been tested for the situation where they’ll be used. That the military would leap at the chance to use such a thing without adequate data supporting it does not come as any surprise to me. Not at all. But look past the military, at a much larger market, where that data supporting the effectiveness of the devices *would* seem a lot more appropriate: used on Americans, here at home.
Never mind the fundamental problems with any kind of polygraph – that technology is already widely accepted as an investigative tool up to and including being accepted in some courts of law. Never mind that this device is much more limited than a conventional polygraph machine, and doesn’t require the operator to have extensive training to use it.
The device is being tested by the military. They just don’t know it. And once it is in use, some version of the technology will be adapted for more generalized police use. Just consider how it will be promoted to the law enforcement community: as a way of screening suspects. Then, as a way of finding suspects. Then, as a way of checking anyone who wants access to some critical facility. Then, as a way of checking anyone who wants access to an airplane, train, or bus.
Just how long do you think it will be before you have to pass a test by one of these types of devices in your day-to-day life? I give it maybe ten years. But I worry that I am an optimist.
Jim Downey
(Via this dKos story. Cross-posted to UTI.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Government, movies, Philip K. Dick, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Travel
Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.
Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.
‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’
“We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society” . . . and turn them into criminals by the way we treat them from the very start.
The Minority Report, anyone? No, not the movie, which was OK, but the original short story by Philip K. Dick, which also shows the dangers of a post-war military regime/mindset to a civil society.
See, here’s the thing: people will largely react to the way you treat them (yes, I am generalizing.) If you take one set of people, and treat them like criminals from early childhood, guess what you’ll get?
I am constantly dismayed by just how much Great Britain has become a surveillance society, to the point where it is a dis-incentive to want to travel there. In almost all towns of any real size, you are constantly within sight of multiple CCTV cameras, and there is increasing use of biometrics (such as fingerprint ID) as a general practice for even routine domestic travel.
But getting DNA of all five year olds, under the excuse that it will better allow for catching criminals? Scary. To then match that up with the notion that you can predict the future behaviour of a 5 year old, based on someone’s model of personality development is just plain insane.
And you know that if they can pull this off in Britain, there will be plenty of people who think it should be instituted here.
Welcome to the future.
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing. Cross-posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, General Musings, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff
[This post contains both minor and major spoilers about Communion of Dreams. As usual, I will insert an additional note prior to each paragraph where the spoiler occurs.]
I’ve written previously about psychic abilities, and specifically addressed how they may function in the way I use them in Communion. Via TDG, another perspective on how a collective awareness among humans which functions below the level of consciousness may demonstrate this. From the article about the Global Consciousness Project:
From then on, Dr Nelson was hooked. Using the Internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line. But during the funeral of Princess Diana something extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards and reached for the sky. It was clear that they’d detected a totally new phenomena. The concentrated mental effort of millions of people appeared to be influencing the output of random event generators around the world. But how? Dr Nelson was still at a loss to explain it.
In 1998 he gathered together scientists from all over the world to try and understand the phenomena. They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen Jahn and Nelson’s work. The Global Consciousness Project was born.
Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the ‘eyes’ of the project. And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure. The Eggs not only ‘sensed’ the moment that Princess Diana was buried, but also the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Kursk tragedy and America’s hung election of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations such as New Year’s Eve. Even more bizarrely, they sense the celebrations as they sweep through the Earth’s different time zones. The project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11th 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs. Not only did they register the event as it happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began four hours before the two planes hit the Twin Towers.
The article, and the Wiki entry about the Global Consciousness Project, explain more of the background behind the Project. Basically, in the 70s experiments were done using random number generators to see whether individuals could effect the outcome of the machines. Some tantalizing results were found, and further research lead to even more possible evidence of some kind of psychic ability, particularly among groups of people. I followed a lot of this work being reported in the popular press and was always intrigued with it.
[Minor spoilers in the next paragraph.]
When I got to thinking about Communion, I decided to make use of some of the ideas generated by this research – ideas pertaining to the collective awareness of a large group of people anticipating some significant forthcoming event. This is specifically why I have the AI Seth being directed to perform large-scale analysis of discussion boards, chat rooms, personal blogging (though I don’t call it that), and so forth, to see if there are any keyword descriptors which pop up with some unexpected frequency. The assumption is that in a survey of a large enough population, some collective hint of the future is possible.
[Major spoilers in the next paragraph.]
It turns out that not only is there indeed a collective awareness operating, but that it clearly and closely reflects the personal experiences of the protagonist Jon, as seen in his ‘dreams’. Hence one of the meanings of the title of the book: Communion of Dreams. This, however, turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg – that there is not just a collective unconscious awareness that can be tapped into (individually through dreams, or statistically by seeing the sorts of things that people are discussing), but that there are other psychic abilities which have been artificially suppressed as a result of outside interference. I have my own thoughts on how these mechanism would operate, and some of those are hinted at in the text, but I decided that it would be better to leave some mystery about that, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Now, I am a skeptic – I do not ‘believe’ in things unless there is sufficient data to support a theory explaining how something works. But I also keep an open mind about areas where the data provide some insight but support no conclusions. This is one of those areas – and as such, perfectly suitable for use in a book of Science Fiction . . . as has been used by countless authors over the last 150 years or so.
Read the article. It might challenge your thinking.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 